SOURCE: “From Double Words to Single Vision: Patriarchal Desire in Much Ado about Nothing and Othello,” in Anxious Pleasures: Shakespearean Comedy and the Nation-State, Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995, pp. 170-93.

[In the essay that follows, Hall contends that both Much Ado about Nothing and Othelloundermine—through their use and treatment of language—the establishment of any single interpretation of the texts.]

The opening witty dialogue in Much Ado About Nothing between Beatrice and Benedick consists in a deadlocked rivalry, which seeks to deny that there is a relationship between them:

Beatrice. I wonder you will
still be talking, Signor Benedick. Nobody marks you.
Benedick. What, my dear Lady Disdain!
Are you still living?

(1.1.107ff.)

This is a rivalry of indifferences. Now, real indifference is impossible in dialogue, since it would then not be a sign but a natural state unengaged with the other. Proclaimed “indifference” is a weapon of attack and/or defense, but as soon as it is used as such, it reveals its nature as a dialogically charged sign. Like all the signs of wit, “indifference” is deployed in a power struggle, and its meanings cannot be fixed in advance. All that is certain is that “indifference” (as sign) is not really indifference.

The theater is made of signs. Nothing is what it seems, and yet there is a strong desire that things and people should either be what they seem, or reveal their being from behind their seeming. This desire also arises from the sign, and is intensified in the theatrical deployment of signs. One should therefore always beware of the pressure towards interpretive synthesis in much academic criticism, which aims above all at the production of determinate characters through unacknowledged extrapolation from the contradictory movement of the dramatic discourse. It is typical of such critical accounts to translate the hostility and combat of Beatrice and Benedick into an appearance, beneath which is to be found the essential reality of their love. For example, Northrop Frye writes:

Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado are [similarly] mechanical comic humors, prisoners of their own wit, until a benevolent practical joke enables their real feelings to break free of their verbal straitjackets.¹

One consequence is that the plot becomes one of revelation: “The action of a comedy often leads to a kind of self-knowledge which releases a character from the bondage of his humor.”² The difficulty in thinking against the strong tide of presuppositions guiding such interpretations is that they are not entirely wrong. That would be too simple. But in their rewriting of plot and its discursive clashes as dramatic strategies of revelation, they write the integrations brought about by the ending back into the whole of the dramatic text, abolishing thereby all suggestion of a real constitutive instability, with its attendant anxieties, in the first place. Actually, the strength of such criticism, (its rhetorical persuasiveness is seductive), is that such a regressive stabilization of the text gratifies us, its readership, by the removal of uncertainty, repeating with a certain deceptive accuracy the strategies of closure in the plays themselves. The critical loss is the denial of the textual process as one of the production of alternative possibilities for desire.

It is in this sense that Terry Eagleton is surely right, when he writes of Much Ado About Nothing:

The love between Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado is the effect of elaborately fictitious information fed to each partner, so that it is impossible to decide whether this groundless discourse uncovers a love which was “naturally” there, or actually constructs it.³

This undecidability is important. What happens is that Don Pedro and Claudio, supported by Margaret and Ursula, take over the plot-producing trickster function assigned exclusively to Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew. Their “construction” of love is actually an interpretation of each of the partners which is offered, through the contrived overhearings, to the other, who accepts it as true.

At first, the comic effect is straightforward. Benedick alone has accepted the interpretation of Beatrice's hostile demeanor as a cover for love (like a mystified Petruchio), and the plotters have not yet suggested this hermeneutic strategy to Beatrice. Here the audience laughs, “knowing,” for the moment, that Benedick is mistaken:

Benedick. By this day, she’s
a fair lady. I do spy some marks of love in her.
Beatrice. Against my will I am sent
to bid you come in to dinner.
Benedick. Fair Beatrice, I thank
you for your pains.
Beatrice. I took no more pains for
those thanks than you took pains to thank me. If it had been painful I would
not have come.
Benedick. You take pleasure, then,
in the message?
Beatrice. Yea, just so much as you
may take upon a knife's point and choke a daw withal.

(Much Ado About Nothing, 2.3.236ff.)

Actually, Beatrice's words are capable of being interpreted in opposing senses but, seeing the benevolent plot in action, the audience can still feel able to separate the “real” meaning from Benedick's comically mistaken interpretation that follows:

Benedick. Ha! “Against
my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.” There’s a double
meaning in that. “I took no more pains for those thanks than you took
pains to thank me.” That’s as much as to say “Any pains
that I take for you is as easy as thanks.”—If I do not take pity
of her I am a villain. If I do not love her I am a Jew. I will go get her
picture.

(2.3.248ff.)

The contrived overhearing is an example of a play enclosing another play, which is common in the Shakespearean opus as a whole. It is particularly striking in Much Ado About Nothing, for the benevolent plot of Claudio and Don Pedro is set against the malevolent plot of Don John, and Don John's staged machinations are reversed in their turn by the quasi-providential plotting of the friar. This play, then, consists largely of plays within plays, and the real audience is interested in the effect of these inner plays on their fictional audience. What we witness is the benevolent plotters' construction of a fictional theater for Benedick. I call it a fictional theater (and not an example of theatrical self-referentiality or mise-en-abîme) because it is addressed to Benedick's desire for clarification and hidden truth. It is a voyeuristic fantasy theater where, for him alone, the ambiguities of the real theater cease. It constrains him to regress to an infantile state of narcissism, anterior to the duplicity of signs where the real theater persists. This regression is dependent upon the “realist” illusion, in which the spectacle is supposed (by the deluded subject) to be free from the duplicity of the sign. But the audience sees that its realist simplicity is an illusion addressed to his desire. If they partly identify with that desire for clarification, they are nonetheless also held at a distance from it.

When the same interpretive strategy is foisted upon Beatrice, the effect is cumulative. The mistake (or “fiction,” since it is constructed) becomes the truth, because it is confirmed by the other, but at the same time it remains a fictional construct. The conclusion of Claudio's and Don Pedro's benevolent plot organizes this fiction-become-truth into a hierarchy in which the hostility is appearance and love is the reality. At the same time, however, Shakespeare's play does not endorse this simple closure. What is actually restored is not this regressive idealist illusion, but the duplicity of signs, however paradoxical this may sound.

Terry Eagleton comments that the marriages which close the comedies are “the organic society in miniature, a solution to sexual and political dilemmas so ludicrously implausible that even Shakespeare himself seems to have had difficulty in believing it.” I would argue that this depends upon the larger critical myth of “recognition” with its structural re-writing of plot. Eagleton's summary of the marriage as myth makes the point that it re-writes desire in essentialist terms:

Marriage is not an arbitrary force which coercively hems in desire, but reveals its very inward structure—what desire, if only it had known, had wanted all the time. When you discover your appropriate marriage partner you can look back, rewrite your autobiography and recognize that all your previously coveted objects were in fact treacherous, displaced parodies of the real thing, shadows of the true substance. This, broadly speaking, is the moment of the end of the comedies. Marriage is natural, in the sense of being the outward sign or social role which expresses your authentic inward being, as opposed to those deceitful idioms which belie it. It is the true language of the erotic self, the point at which the spontaneity of individual feeling and the stability of public institutions harmoniously interlock.⁴

The retroactive function of marriage is to act as the disclosure of the “truth” of desire in the service of social order. The sense of the ending which rewrites the middle in terms of appearance and essence is the crucial activity of the myth. Eagleton's passing appeal to Shakespeare's “difficulty in believing” is best understood as a self-deconstructive property of the comic text, whereby the dramatic discourse undoes its own myths of closure. For me, the main interest is that this deconstruction of the monological plot and its closure can be related to the complex relations of anxiety and pleasure. The Beatrice-Benedick plot in Much Ado About Nothing ends with less stress on the socialized libido (marriage) than on the corresponding socialization of hostile rivalry within the language of desire. This is what makes the marriage possible. The agency for this is the restoration of mutual joking, with its ambiguities that allow hostility to be misrecognized as mere appearance. Since Beatrice and Benedick at the end mutually agree to interpret verbal aggression as a cover for love, aggression is allowed to continue in the form of joking banter. The jokes with which this play ends resemble the opening but they are not absolutely the same. Their hostility, which runs momentarily wild in the middle of the play, is recontained in the end. The recontainment of violence, via a joking misrecognition, seems to me the main point. The comic plot transforms violence into harmony, but the harmony is shot through with anxiety over the possible alternative resolution. Love is precariously close to hostility. Only the joke holds this disastrous “clarification” in abeyance.

The witty engagement with the other person is certainly a desire to please that person, and it can be construed as a verbal act of “love.” But it is never free from narcissistic self-assertion, and rival narcissisms imply a state of war. That is to say, when the very act of pleasing the other through the seductive language of wit is also an act of power, the individual seeks the euphoric gratification of mastery in the other's admission of a vulnerable interiority set up by the speaker. This is the opening situation between Beatrice and Benedick. It is not a stable hierarchy in which real love is waiting to be released from the constraints of a surface hostility. It is a degree of rivalry within wit itself, unexplored even in the formal combats of Love's Labour's Lost. It is as though Beatrice had watched the process of Katherina's interpellation, and was now playing from a position of equality, or at least a bid for it. The result is a deadlock of wills. Only the intervention of a set of tricksters, Don Pedro and Claudio with their plot, can resolve it by setting up a mutual “recognition” which stabilizes the combat into an interiorized hierarchy, where hostility can be (mis)recognized as an appearance covering the reality of love. Before the intervention of Don Pedro and Claudio, the play shows the opening situation of mutual joking descending towards disaster. Through their intervention, Don Pedro and Claudio rescue the relationship from mutual destruction, but the perceptibly fictional nature of the rescue places the audience in a divided position vis à vis their own pleasure. It hovers on the edge of a critical awareness of the means by which its own gratifications in the stabilizing closure have been achieved.

In formal terms the Beatrice-Benedick relationship undergoes a process of disastrous disambiguation, before ambiguity is restored, by mutual consent, at the end. In the closing jokes, the old hostility is rehearsed, but harmlessly now, within an acceptance of the plot as truthful revelation which has brought the recalcitrant couple together:

Benedick. Do not you love
me?
Beatrice. Why no, no more than reason.
Benedick. Why then, your uncle and
the Prince Claudio
Have been deceived. They swore you did.
Beatrice. Do not you love me?
Benedick. Troth no, no more than
reason.
Beatrice. Why then, my cousin, Margaret,
and Ursula
Are much deceived, for they did swear you did.

(5.4.74ff.)

They still do not have the precise knowledge that the others' words which they cite here are fictional. They have become the truth. Artifice has become nature. When the other characters go on to produce sonnets which Beatrice and Benedick have written, as proof of their love against what they are now saying, a joyfully schizoid Benedick exclaims:

A miracle! Here's our own hands against our hearts.

(5.4.91)

At the macro level too, the artifice of plotting which has virtually written the love into Beatrice and Benedick, has now become the expression of a “nature” from which it cannot be disentangled. The installation of harmony at the end of this plot is achieved, in all its precariousness, not through disambiguation of signs (i.e., “clarification”) but through the restoration of the ambiguities of wit. It is a triumph of writing, or artifice, for it was the drive to clarification that threatened the disaster that is finally averted.

It might seem paradoxical that it is the masque scene that precipitates the disastrous disambiguation. The masque scene in act 2 resembles the Muscovite masque in Love's Labour's Lost, in the way that it sets up illusions, not in the female beholders to whom it is addressed, but in the male producers. Only Claudio and Benedick believe that their masque disguises are impenetrable. They think they are “unseen” and are therefore in control of the other. Such simplicity in Claudio enables Don John to trap him into jealousy, by pretending to address him as Benedick and asking him to get Don Pedro to desist in his attentions to Hero. Benedick is more subtly, but similarly, trapped by his own disguise. His belief in the impenetrability of the mask functions almost magically as a narcissistic regression. He knows, of course, that he is being duplicitous, but he thinks that his little “theater” will induce others into direct speech, and that they will not perceive his duplicity. Although he is staging the theater here, he behaves in exactly the same way as when Claudio and Don Pedro stage the overhearing scene for him.

The narcissistic regression to childish simplicity actually makes him vulnerable in the world of signs, because he never questions his assumption that Beatrice does not know that she is talking to him when she describes him as the Prince's fool. Therefore, uncharacteristically (if we consider his wit to be characteristic) he disambiguates her speech when he repeats it to Don Pedro:

Benedick. She told me—not
thinking I had been myself—that I was the Prince's jester, that
I was duller than a great thaw, huddling jest upon jest with such impossible
conveyance upon me that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting
at me. She speaks poniards, and every word stabs. … I would not marry
her though she were endowed with all that Adam had left him before he transgressed.
She would have made Hercules have turned spit, yea, and have cleft his club
to make the fire, too.

(2.1.226ff.)

He ends his lament with the locus classicus of the impotent warrior and the castrating female. Then, still not seeing Beatrice's speech as a joke, he blames her for a slander on himself, and sets out to run her down in public, fulfilling his promise of revenge. If we are unwilling to essentialize Benedick as simply vicious beneath his jesting, we must attend to the dynamics of the discourse here. The masque scene places Benedick in the position of the fool who cannot see Beatrice's joke (an unusual posture for him). In this scene the joking relationship between Beatrice and Benedick undergoes a process of disambiguation, brought about by Benedick's failure to meet joke with joke. But the disambiguation of signs is not the same as simply being wrong. The reproach to someone that they “cannot see a joke” is often an evasion itself, a way of failing to acknowledge that he or she has correctly estimated the aggression which the joke normally both conveys and denies. In other words, the “misunderstanding” of a joke is also an undeniably accurate way of understanding it.

The disturbing point is that Benedick's failure brings out a truth of the witty discourse: the love is not more essential than the aggression. The hostility, no longer restrained by the mutual consent which should conventionally contain it within the established norms of the war of wit, threatens to run riot. When Don Pedro proposes to achieve “one of Hercules' labours” and bring the pair “into a mountain of affection th’one with th’other” (2.1.342), his proposal amounts to reversing this process of disambiguation in the opposite direction. My argument is not that the aggression is more essential than the love, which would be a mere inversion of the more common essentializing interpretation. It is that the witty exchange at the beginning contains both potentials. When Leonato says to the messenger: “You must not, sir, mistake my niece. There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signor Benedick and her” (1.1.55ff.), he is trying to account for the excessive acerbity of her tone. His explanation is not, as it were, the voice of analytic truth. It is a response to the breach of decorum in Beatrice's excess, which it explains away, more or less successfully. Both Beatrice and Benedick have been compared to Lady Emilia Pia and Lord Gaspar Pallavicino, representatives of decorous courtly wit in the immensely influential translation of Castiglione's Il Libro del Cortegiano⁵, but actually the most striking feature of their wit, even at the beginning, is the way in which it hovers at the point of the breakdown of decorum. This is not to deny the Castiglione connection. The point is that the Beatrice-Benedick plot enacts a breakdown, which is where it explores the language of wit instead of merely representing it.

The drive to clarification is in perpetual conflict with the duplicity of signs. (In this sense, clarification contradicts theatricality.) Even before Benedick's appearance at the beginning of the play, there is a debate between Beatrice and the messenger over Benedick's nature. The messenger defends him as “a good soldier,” and Beatrice reproaches “signor Mountanto” (“upthrust” in sword-play) for being a verbal braggart, and by the same token sexually untrustworthy, a man who changes his faith “as the fashion of his hat” (1.1.68). She makes other hints about a previous broken engagement, and some critics are satisfied by references to an earlier narrative as the key to some kind of truth. Actually, we are confronted with the same issue as in Love's Labour's Lost. The witty sexual war is accompanied by extreme distrust on the part of the witty lady. As in the earlier play, the “merry war” is situated just at the termination of a real war of arms, and the nature of the male warrior identity is put into question by the shift from deeds into language.

However, the outcome is totally different; so much so, that this play almost seems like a rejoinder to the closure proposed in Love's Labour's Lost. As a wit, Benedick has an undecidable mobility associated with duplicity:

Don Pedro. By my troth, I
speak my thought.
Claudio. And in faith, my lord, I
spoke mine.
Benedick. And by my two faiths and
troths, my lord, I spoke mine.

(1.1.207ff.)

As in Love's Labour's Lost, the mistrusting witty lady, Beatrice, offers to the witty and wordy lord, Benedick, the partly unwelcome but irresistible opportunity to prove his faith in deeds. The feudal test here is simple: “Kill Claudio!” The archaic regression to the warrior romance, where being is underwritten by deed, is more disturbing than the stylized feudal test at the end of Love's Labour's Lost. The witty Beatrice is swept up in a barbaric desire for revenge by the public insult to her “kinswoman,” and she challenges Benedick to prove that ultimately he is a man of his word. Overtaken by the regressive fantasy which shapes the whole of Don John's plot, she defines men (i.e., “real” men) by the directness of deed instead of shilly-shallying verbal evasion: “O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace” (4.1.305). She cannot be a man, but she can challenge Benedick to show that he is not just words:

Beatrice. But manhood is melted
into curtsies, valour into compliment, and men are only turned into tongue,
and trim ones too: he is now as valiant as Hercules that only tells a lie
and swears it. I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman
with grieving.

(4.1.317ff.)

Benedick, for his part, is trapped. He meets Beatrice's challenge, and he will prove his faith in the archaic manner, but the display of faith is totally separate from belief in the rightness of what he is doing. He will act because Beatrice thinks “in her [your] soul” that Claudio has wronged Hero. But it is still roleplaying.

Beatrice's regression to an archaic or nostalgic version of manhood makes her appear somewhat like Lady Macbeth “unsexing” herself as a challenge to her husband to act. Her desire to be a “man” is inseparable from her reproach to Benedick that he is not one. When Benedick rapidly yields to the force of Beatrice's challenging reference to a general lack of manhood in the present age of signs, when “manhood is melted into curtsies …,” their shared nostalgia for the lost epoch of manhood is much more significant than the gender difference between them. Fortunately, unlike Love's Labour's Lost, the ending restores wit and ambiguity in place of the disaster which the desired proof of male selfhood threatens to bring about. Nonetheless, the symbiotic relationship between Beatrice and Benedick, which ensures that both share the anxiety that is the obverse of wit, means that they are jointly vulnerable to the lure of a lost phallocentrism.

THE DESIRE FOR SINGLE VISION

The drive to clarification, the desire to get behind appearances to a supposed truth, is a violent desire. My comparison with the ending of Love's Labour's Lost has shown that, at least in the Beatrice-Benedick plot, this death wish, which is also a phallocentric and a historical regression, is averted by a restoration of the ambiguity of signs. The violence which overtakes Beatrice and Benedick also arises from their involvement in the romance plot of Claudio and Hero. In turning to this now, I want to discuss its striking similarity with the plot of Othello, because in both the comic romance and the tragedy, patriarchal murder of the beloved is a desire organized through the lure of the visible.

The point that I wish to establish is not the commonplace that appearances are deceptive. That implies that there is a truth which is not deceptive; both Othello and Claudio “know” this and passionately desire to see it. My point, then, is quite other. It is that looking is a libidinal drive. It informs Benedick's regressive narcissism in the masque scene, where he seeks to look upon the women but to be impenetrable to their gaze. It is the same voyeuristic drive that makes him vulnerable to the benevolent plotters' staged seduction, for he is alert to the duplicities of language but blind to the fact that the visible is also a series of signs through which he is vulnerable. Towards the end of the play, when he “recognizes” his true nature, the audience sees this recognition as a dramatic joke: he is in fact being constructed by the plotters, even at the level of his desires. This is more problematic than mere deceit, for “deceit” implies an alternative truth that is being concealed. But, at the end, Benedick is actually saved from further anxiety, and potential violence, through his lack of suspicion towards the visible:

Benedick. Signor Leonato,
truth it is, good signor,
Your niece regards me with an eye of favour.
Leonato. That eye my daughter lent
her, ’tis most true.
Benedick. And I do with an eye of
love requite her.
Leonato. The sight whereof I think
you had from me,
From Claudio, and the Prince. But what’s your will?
Benedick. Your answer, sir, is enigmatical.
But for my will, my will is your good will
May stand with ours this day to be conjoined
In the state of honourable marriage …

(5.4.21ff.)

For Benedick, the idea that his desiring eyes are borrowed is “enigmatical,” since visuality is for him beyond the play of signs. He does not know that he has been trapped into love in the same way that Claudio was trapped into hatred. But the audience, which knows better, is also more deeply perplexed by the joke which gives it pleasure. For the closing harmony of “wills” or desires is also constructed out of signs. This constructed satisfaction of the ocular drive is worth comparing with the address of Iago and Don John to their male victims, for they concern the same anxiety.

In the case of Othello and Claudio, the scopic drive is constructed by the malevolent plotters and turns to a murderous violence, of which they are also the victims. The common name for that violence is jealousy, but naming something should not be considered the end of enquiry. As we are dealing with a desire, it is necessary to understand the satisfaction which it seeks, and the anxiety which it tries to overcome. My argument is that, within a patriarchal discourse, the scopic drive promises a gratifying certainty and recentering of the dominant (male) subject, and that this is exacerbated by the very perception of the unreliability of signs. Othello is an exploration of the crisis of the sign within the patriarchy, where the scopic drive seeks stabilization through murder. I turn to Othello first, because my argument is that the tragedy takes to extremes what the comic romance precariously averts, but only through a benevolent counterplot which relies equally on the scopic drive. The tragedy and the comedy both employ malevolent plotters, whose seductive address to the anxieties of their respective warrior figures throws into relief the peculiar gratifications which they offer.

Through Iago's leading rhetorical question: “Did Michael Cassio, when you wooed my lady, / Know of your love?” (Othello, 3.3.96ff.), the anxiety and the desire to know are simultaneously constructed in Othello. (Indeed they are the same desire.) Iago does not need to pretend that his question is innocent. He presents himself to Othello as a tantalizing site, rivaling Desdemona herself as the keeper of a desired knowledge, where truth could be separated from appearance. He suggests an absent content behind his words, thereby provoking a desire for immediate (visible) presence. Othello responds with this desire for visibility:

Othello. ‘Think, my
lord?’
By heaven, thou echo'st me
As if there were some monster in thy thought
Too hideous to be shown! Thou dost
mean something.
                                        If thou dost love me,
Show me thy thought [emphases added]

(3.3.110ff.)

Iago's verbal seduction actually flaunts language as a veil. That which is feared, the ‘monstrous’, is also desired, because it is presented as concealed knowledge, which, if visibly possessed, would put an end to the concealments of language. From this point on, the desire for disambiguation, with its promise (which is also a threat) for a final separation of essence and appearance, takes over. Iago focuses its violence on Desdemona's body. She is the site of an equivocation, an enigmatic body that must be destroyed in order to arrive at a clarification. This clarification will take the form of the compelled confession prior to execution, for that particular exercise of royal power as the theater of truth is also part of Othello's fantasy. Such is the force of the desire set up by Iago's seduction that if Desdemona's body does not satisfy it through “ocular proof,” Iago's will:

Othello. (taking Iago by the throat)
Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore.
Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof,
Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul,
Thou hadst better have been born a dog
Than answer my naked wrath. [emphasis added]

(3.3.364ff.)

The fantasy which Iago offers Othello is the role of a judge whose gaze would be able to penetrate the duplicity of signs, separate essence from appearance, and compel confession. It is a fantasy of the power to effect transcendental stabilization, and it is an interpretive desire for order which only comes into being because of the anxieties which besiege patriarchal possession.

Iago subtly strengthens the desire for the dreaded proof by meditating aloud on the unfulfillable nature of ocular “satisfaction,” at least for “mortal eyes.” “Satisfaction” becomes a key word which links punishment with desire:

Iago. You would be satisfied?
Othello. Would? Nay, and I will.
Iago. And may. But how, how satisfied
my lord?
Would you, the supervisor, grossly gape on,
Behold her topped?
Othello. Death and damnation! O!
Iago. It were a tedious difficulty,
I think,
To bring them to that prospect. Damn them then
If ever mortal eyes do see them bolster
More than their own! What then, how then?
What shall I say? Where's satisfaction?
It is impossible you should see this,
Were they as prime as goats, as hot as monkeys,
As salt as wolves in pride, and fools as gross
As ignorance made drunk. But yet I say,
If imputation, and strong circumstances
Which lead directly to the door of truth,
Will give you satisfaction, you might ha’t.

(3.3.398ff.)

Iago taunts Othello with the impossibility for “mortal eyes” to see what language can suggest. The secrets of others can only be perceived by God, and it is in achieving such transcendental vision that true “satisfaction” is also achieved. Iago offers the closest approximation, not quite to the inaccessible truth, but to “the door of truth,” to glimpse it voyeuristically from outside. Jealousy here is a desire for the “prospect” or vision of the elusive object, which is named “satisfaction.”

The visual satisfaction, which turns to murder, involves the deferral of bodily sexual consummation. For some psychoanalytical critics this deferral is actually a horror of consummation focussed on the white handkerchief, “spotted” with strawberries, which Othello inherited from his mother and passed to the virginal Desdemona, only to see it reappear in the hands of Bianca.⁶ It seems to me that there is no need to invoke the primal scene of parental intercourse as a textual absence, when Othello himself names the handkerchief as a talisman of his mother's hymen received from the Egyptian “charmer”:

Othello. She told her, while
she kept it
’Twould make her amiable, and subdue my father
Entirely to her love; but if she lost it,
Or made a gift of it, my father's eye
Should hold her loathed, and his spirit should hunt
After new fancies.

(3.3.58ff.)

Here Othello tells Desdemona that the magic of the hymen, which subdues him as it has his father, depends on it being neither lost nor given to anyone. If it is lost, his “father's eye” (i.e., his own now) would turn to hatred and seek “new fancies.” The common meaning of “new loves” is doubled by the more pertinent threat of new satisfactions. That is why the murder itself has appeared to so many critics as a deferred and displaced consummation of their marriage. The numerous associations of the bridal bed with the death bed utilize a common poetic association of consummation with death. But Othello carefully notes how he will eschew the phallic knife and the blood involved, so as to keep her body as a spectacle of visual purity in death. In some part of his fantasy, he considers her inviolate still; or rather, the consummation/death is not merely delayed but staged by the patriarch as a restoration of virginity that will enable the voyeuristic love to persist beyond death. The murder, therefore is a sublimated sexuality, offering a pleasurable spectacle to Othello himself. The fact that murder as sublimation of bodily desire implies a horrifying visual “aesthetics” makes Shakespeare's discourse non-complicit with this pleasure.

The horror arises from the constraining power of the fantasy over Othello, which is such that it offers him gratification in the spectacle of himself as “Justice” personified, even while it breaks him. His fantasized restoration of order (“she must die, else she’ll betray more men”), is a necrophilic desire whose gratification is the feeling of heavenly sorrow, as though Othello were the spectator at his own and Desdemona's tragedy:

Othello. O balmy breath, that
dost almost persuade
Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.
Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee
And love thee after. One more, and that’s the last.
                    (He kisses her)
So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
But they are cruel tears. This sorrow's heavenly,
It strikes where it doth love.

(5.2.16ff.)

In order to play the fantasy role of the divine Judge, and enjoy thereby the “heavenly sorrow,” this hero has overstepped the bounds of traditional patriarchy. In his fantasy, which is a kind of tragic hubris, he has become God. I would argue that this should be linked, not simply to traditional patriarchy, but to the complex historical moment of its crisis when the threat to possession is such that the male hero enacts for himself on the stage the powerful compensating fantasy of a traditionally forbidden transcendental role. He sees himself performing the divine role, and derives narcissistic pleasure from the spectacle. Shakespeare's drama, therefore, also enables a critical encounter with the patriarchal fantasies that it represents. It provokes in the audience a horrified encounter with the pleasure that the destructive desire for order brings with it. This pleasure is produced by Iago's address to patriarchal anxieties, and this is what makes Iago a figure of contemporary decentering of power. Othello's pain is obvious. What is less obvious is the satisfaction. But without at least the promise of pleasure, in the form of a kind of gratification to fill the gaps opened by the anxieties which he provokes, the trickster could not seduce. The pleasure or “satisfaction” that Iago offers to Othello is the patriarchal fantasy of himself as the almighty Judge, the ultimate interpreter of signs, and disambiguator of appearance and essence.

Stephen Greenblatt has argued persuasively that the desires set in motion in Desdemona by Othello's seductive narration of himself, become a threat to him because he is aware that Desdemona has not been attracted by a real self, i.e., a “natural” self, but by a narrative fiction. Greenblatt glosses Othello's “narrative self-fashioning” as similar to Lacan's version of the endlessly frustrating construction of the self in analysis.⁷ The connection between Othello's anxiety and Iago's manipulation of it is brought about by Iago's exploitative, quasi-imperialist “empathy.” Throughout the play, the socially impossible status of the racial misalliance, points back to the bewitching power of Othello's wooing narrative which overthrew that social normality, conventionally called “nature.” Iago's rhetorical triumph really consists in the way that he brings Othello himself to share the metropolitan discourse of the “natural,” because then Desdemona's love for him must be the most violent decentering of “nature.” In this respect, the dialogue between Iago and Othello is an astonishing representation of the discourse of cultural imperialism interpellating its subject, so that Othello's induced destruction of Desdemona is preceded by an acquiescence in the conquest of himself:

Othello. And yet how nature,
erring from itself—
Iago. Ay, there’s the point;
as, to be bold with you,
Not to affect many proposed matches
Of her own clime, complexion, and degree,
Whereto we see in all things nature tends.
Foh, one may smell in such a will most rank
Foul disproportions, thoughts unnatural!

(3.3.232ff.)

Thus Iago is able to speak for Othello's anxieties, and to suggest that if Desdemona loved Cassio, that would actually be a return to “nature” and to “better judgement”:

Iago. But pardon me. I do
not in position
Distinctly speak of her, though I may fear
Her will, recoiling to her better judgement,
May fall to match you with her country forms
And happily repent.
Othello Farewell, farewell.
If more thou dost perceive, let me know more.

(3.3.239ff.)

When Othello accepts the dominant discourse that casts him out on the grounds of deviance from the “natural,” he goes on to allow Iago's eyes to see for him too. Iago's plot will depend crucially on the manipulation of Othello's desire to see.

However, Othello's anxieties are not just those of an alien but of the European patriarch, whose place he has recently come to occupy. He occupies a patriarchal position, but without being a patriarch, since the position is usurped. It is this very decenteredness that makes him the representative figure of patriarchal anxiety. A further implication of Greenblatt's Lacanian argument would have to be that the drive to construct a stable self beyond the displacements of narrative is also a regressive drive to return to the “mirror phase,” that is to get back to the mythical visual image of a whole self, constructed in the Imaginary prior to the decenterings at the level of the Symbolic. Presumably, this mythical other self would not conquer Desdemona through the dark sorcery of language (Othello agrees with this charge of Brabantio's, for he too is now a patriarch fearing betrayal), but would have a “naturally” prettier, i.e., more socially acceptable, face. Obviously, Cassio has a socially endorsed visible presence that Othello lacks, but Iago selects him also because of their joint wooing in the past. Othello's “love” for Cassio goes back to their joint wooing, and this very identification of Cassio as alterego makes Iago's charge irresistible. Cassio is the self that Othello desires to be and to see himself being, and which Desdemona could love without violating “nature” and betraying her father, with whom Othello also identifies. Thus Iago's plot gets fully under way within the same topos as the initiation of Claudio's anxiety in Much Ado About Nothing. The topos of the double wooing is a major figure for an inward fissure, and Othello's racial/cultural marginality actually functions to make him more representative of the crisis of patriarchy than the more comfortably assured Venetian patriarchs themselves.

It is not uncommon to find critics of Much Ado About Nothing paying scant attention to Don Pedro's early proxy wooing of Hero, because Don John's opportunist construction of jealousy in Claudio is short-lived, a failure preceding his more successful, because visually staged, deception. The short-lived episode seems to have little dramatic function within the larger whole. But it introduces the same problems as Othello's wooing: viz. what is the self who speaks and seduces, if the fruits of victory are transferable? Initially Don Pedro makes a promise concerning the power of his wooing discourse:

Don Pedro. I will assume thy
part in some disguise,
And tell fair Hero I am Claudio.
And in her bosom I’ll unclasp my heart
And take her hearing prisoner with the force
And strong encounter of my amorous tale.
Then after to her father will I break,
And the conclusion is, she shall be thine.

(1.1.301ff.)

What can “thine” mean, under such conditions? Don Pedro simply assumes the transferability of the woman conquered in verbal engagement. But that transferability has become a problem to the “possessor.” It is not simply a matter of Don Pedro popping the question in disguise. Hero's response would then be unequivocally addressed to the man she took to be Claudio. But if Don Pedro is right, and her self-surrender is her response to the power of language, then language threatens the very possession which it enables, because there is no unique self to do the possessing. Another may do it as well. Don Pedro's restitution of Hero to her rightful owner is an incomplete resolution to the anxieties evoked by this episode.

Don Pedro protests to the mocking Benedick that it is only because Claudio lacks a voice that he has spoken for him:

I will but teach them to sing, and restore them to the owner.

(2.1.216)

But Claudio is not literally dumb or incoherent. In fact he is often verbally dexterous when the plot requires it. Nonetheless, he represents an attitude of impatience and suspicion towards language, which is extremely important because it is a desire to get beyond it. That desire, born of suspicion towards all speech including his own, is what Don John exploits. Claudio is from the aristocracy of the sword, and wishes that language would be nothing but a reliable means to achieve an end. When Don Pedro cuts him short with “Thou wilt be like a lover presently, / And tire the hearer with a book of words” (2.1.289ff.), Claudio is relieved to let Don Pedro do the talking for him. Yet he is aware that as a lover he ought to do it for himself. Don Pedro supplies his inadequacy, as Claudio admits:

Claudio. How sweetly you do
minister to love,
That know love's grief by his complexion!
But lest my liking might too sudden seem
I would have salved it with a longer treatise.

(1.1.292ff.)

It is immediately after this that Don Pedro talks of the military power of his own discourse that will capture Hero for Claudio. So Don Pedro's very success enables Don John to precipitate the jealous anxiety in Claudio.

Claudio's lack of a voice is often commented on, mostly in contrast to Beatrice and Benedick, who have an excess in that respect. In contemporary terms, Claudio is the warrior who has not yet fully become a court wit. It might seem that the direct honesty of the soldier, combined with “sincerity” of feeling, would spare the innocent couple from the deviousness of language and signs. But, of course, the play tells a different story. Those who cannot manipulate signs, and even those who regard them with suspicion, can nevertheless be manipulated by them. The simple warrior has his violent romance literature of deeds, which structures his feudal imagination. And Claudio was not alone, since romance plots were largely relatively recent, idealizing reinventions of the feudal past. Nostalgia for a supposed time when virtue could guarantee that word match deed, has the force of a regressive desire for stability in an age sensitive to the political power and duplicity of discourse. The visual is the agency of a desire to regress to the stability of what Lacan labels the Imaginary, prior to the untrustworthiness of signs.

From the standpoint of concepts of consistent characterization, there is an inconsistency when Benedick reflects on the power of love and its transformation of Claudio:

Benedick. He was wont to speak
plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now is he
turned orthography. His words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many
strange dishes.

(2.3.18ff.)

The audience never hears this transformed Claudio. But Benedick's talk of a transformation here mobilizes the common discursive contrast between love and war, in which letters, wit, and femininity are associated with the former term, and masculinity, deeds, and directness, with the latter. (Beatrice too thinks within these terms.) This discursive structuring is so pervasive in Shakespeare and the Renaissance generally, that it would be merely tedious to accumulate references. However, this play is concerned with the way in which the warrior's essentialist and suspicious scorn of signs lays him open to a manipulation of his corresponding desire for truth behind its supposed appearances. Don John's plot, like Iago's, is an address to a desire to get behind language as appearance in order to make final judgments. Its seductive appeal is that its offer of ocular proof claims to bypass language, and is therefore the nearest approximation to certainty that one can get.

Neither Claudio nor Othello actually state that they prefer the disasters of “ocular” clarification to the pleasures of consummation. And yet it is only that preference which can account for their seduction by paltry proofs. They desire to see what they fear. This constructs their sexuality as scopic drive. The commonsense opposition of fear and desire disappears within the overwhelming desire engendered by this discourse, the desire for scopic “satisfaction.” Satisfaction, even today, is a term in which sexual gratification is interchangeable with destructive vengeance. In both cases it names a mythical equilibrium at the end of a desire. The obviousness of the window trick in Much Ado About Nothing has often been observed; indeed Shakespeare does not even trouble to motivate it as well as Ariosto. Quite a number in the audience of the time might well have recognized its actual provenance, from their reading of Harington's translation of Book 5 of Orlando Furioso. But of course, that is not necessary. What is required is nothing more than recognition of the kind of romance plot that it is. There is no need to suppose a uniformly sophisticated audience to advance the view that Shakespeare's play “defamiliarizes” (and paradoxically renews at a more complex level) the somewhat outworn discourse by displaying the desires which it sets in motion. The strategies by which those desires are constructed by Don John cannot entirely escape the attention of the least critically aware. This means that the romance drama of honor and revenge can no longer be naively consumed. The display of its rhetorical production and its power upsets uncritical consumption.⁸

The obviousness of Don John's plot is dramatically meaningful in that it suggests a desire in Claudio to be seduced, which is satisfied by the most perfunctory gestures towards verisimilitude. That is to say, greater Aristotelian probability, whose absence is sometimes deplored, would in fact obscure the workings of desire. Don John partly presents his plot to Claudio and Don Pedro in the guise of a simple test of objective truth. But he also knowingly makes it a challenge to their will to see that truth:

Don John. If you dare not
trust that you see, confess not that you know. If you follow me, I will show
you enough, and when you have seen more and heard more, proceed accordingly.

(3.2.108ff.)

The fanatical “certainty” with which Claudio follows Don John's lesson in the disambiguation of signs, itself testifies to the violence of the desire to know. In the service of the will to power, Claudio becomes a passionate and murderous interpreter:

She’s but the sign and semblance of her honour.
Behold how like a maid she blushes here!
O, what authority and show of truth
Can cunning sin cover itself withal!
Comes not that blood as modest evidence
To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,
All you that see her, that she were a maid,
By these exterior shows? But she is none.
She knows the heat of a luxurious bed.
Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.

(4.1.32ff.)

There is a fierce joy in the release of this anger. Claudio's sense of serving the revelation of truth, in church appropriately enough, blinds him to his own proceeding but not to the duplicity of signs per se. Indeed, that duplicity becomes the target of his anger, because its evil is displaced onto Hero. It is in that displacement that he is truly unconscious.

Where the marriage ceremony calls for the acknowledgement of desire, Claudio finds a new satisfaction in thrusting the desired object away. In his fantasy, the lover has become the judge. But to focus upon this, as though it were the revelation of an essential malevolence of character, would be to miss the way in which the joy is also pain, and the disambiguation of Hero's signs is also self-destruction. Here he resembles Othello. When he exclaims, “Out on thee, seeming! I will write against it” (4.1.56), he adds in the next lines, “You seem to me as Dian in her orb, / As chaste as the bud ere it be blown.” This is a recognition that he is “writing” against himself, and is still caught up in signs. Accordingly, he concludes that Hero's destruction is a destruction of himself, within a generalized misogyny:

For thee I’ll lock up all the gates of love,
And on my eyelids shall conjecture hang
To turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,
And never more shall it be gracious.

(4.1.105ff.)

Don John's plot, it should be stressed, is conceived as an attack on the whole of the ruling order, from which he is excluded by his illegitimacy. What he engineers is a tragedy along the lines of a Spanish honor play. In accordance with the feudal code of honor, the destruction of the honor of the “weaker vessel” is in reality an attack on the patriarch, whose honor is exposed by any inability to defend it in the dependent female. The locus classicus, at least within comedy, is Tirso de Molina's famous Don Juan play, El Burlador de Sevilla (c. 1625?). Patriarchal honor provides the whole dramatic logic of Don Juan Tenorio's assault on the fathers and rulers through the seduction of daughters and wives. It is an assault which provokes violent closure in the form of the revenge of the Supreme Patriarch himself. It is the ultimate revenge play, because the vengeance by God through a reincarnated Father/statue, rescues the whole patriarchal ideology from the mockery of the false son. The latter is even more marked as a traitor to the “blood” because he is not actually a bastard by birth. (The extent to which Tirso's play endorses its own ideology must be left aside here. Certainly the vengeful phallic statue teeters on the edge of the more obviously comic vocation of its later imitators like Molière. But even these have a serious subtext, as the more disturbing aspects of Mozart's opera attest.)

To consider Leonato's or Claudio's condemnation of Hero outside the discourse of honor, in which they are also at stake, would be to miss the whole point. Leonato's paternal curse of Hero is also an act of despair and confession of vulnerability:

Leonato. … mine, and
mine I loved, and mine I praised,
And mine that I was proud on, mine so much
That I to myself was not mine,
Valuing of her—why she, O she
is fallen
Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again. [emphasis added]

(4.1.137ff.)

There is certainly a critique of this value system in Shakespeare's play, but it is not adequately described by attributing an individualistic moralizing judgment of Leonato or Don Claudio to the playwright or his text. The play is more radical (but not necessarily satirical), because the critique bears upon the collective code, and not upon a somewhat sketchy individuality. Shakespeare's play makes the audience witness the patriarchs themselves being manipulated by a trickster figure, who is master of the plot. They are therefore partly victims of a discourse of which they only seem to be the masters. Furthermore it sweeps up others, like Beatrice and Benedick, in its power. This power is only finally arrested by the benevolent counterplot of the friar.

Don John's plot, which threatens to destroy them all in a revenge tragedy, is checked by a benevolent trickster figure whose power over others' desires has a transcendental, ultimately stabilizing effect. The friar begins by addressing Claudio's interpretation of the “exterior shows” of Hero's blushing as “guiltiness, not modesty,” and her father's translation of this signified into the fear of “tainted blood” that haunts him. He replies by transforming her in his speech into a field of conflict, in which the white of innocence and truth triumphs over the tainted red of blood. Then he goes on:

Friar. I have marked
A thousand blushing apparitions
To start into her face, a thousand innocent shames
In angel whiteness beat away those blushes,
And in her eye there hath appeared a fire
To burn the errors that these princes hold
Against her maiden truth.

(4.1.158ff.)

His language borrows Claudio's and Leonato's metaphors, and transforms them into those of the church militant, even down to the inquisitorial fires that burn errors to preserve the purity of truth. Like them, the friar links judgment and violence, and he too talks within essentialist presuppositions. Aware that his “reading” of Hero's signs can be challenged as equally arbitrary as theirs, he immediately grounds it rhetorically in every form of transcendental authority that he can muster:

Friar. Call me a fool,
Trust not my reading nor my observations,
Which with experimental seal doth warrant
The tenor of my book. Trust not my age,
My reverence, calling, nor divinity,
If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here
Under some biting error.

(4.1.164ff.)

He then proposes the counterplot of the fictional death of Hero, to put this authority to the test. The friar's reading of the signs (which the audience knows to be circumstantially correct), is to be transcendentally grounded, and his plot will be a test and revelation of Hero's true nature. But at the same time it is also a way of quickening Claudio's regret for a lost object. That, however, means that it is not a revelation of Hero's essence, but an appeal to Claudio's desire. He counts upon a manipulation of Claudio's desire as a means to bring about the happy outcome:

                                        For it so falls out
That what we have, we prize not to the worth
Whiles we enjoy it, but, being lacked and lost,
Why then we rack the value, then we find
The virtue that possession would not show us
Whiles it was ours.

(4.1.217ff.)

This worldly knowledge informs the strategic address to Claudio's desire, which is the counterplot. Don John's plot is countered on its own grounds (for want of a better word), the manipulation of signs to structure another's desire. Like Claudio and Don Pedro, when they fulfill their dramatic function as benevolent plotters who manipulate Beatrice and Benedick, the friar too converts Claudio's hatred back to love through his socializing plot. The reversibility of the signs of desire and hatred operates in both plots. It has to be said that the friar, in his capacity as theatrical plotter, is a true expert in the power of the inward “eye and prospect of [his] soul” in the construction of desire for the lost object:

Friar. When he shall hear
she died upon his words,
Th’idea of her life shall sweetly creep
Into his study of imagination,
And every lovely organ of her life
Shall come apparelled in more precious habit,
More moving-delicate, and full of life,
Into the eye and prospect of his soul
Than when she lived indeed.

(4.1.223ff.)

He also relies on the persuasive power of the erotic imagination over all convictions of truth:

Friar. Then shall he mourn,
If ever love had interest in his liver,
And wish he had not so accused her,
No, though he thought his accusation true.

(4.1.230ff.)

The friar is an expert seducer, like Don John and Iago, relying on the power of signs. He is a good therapist, but a very equivocal good man. Nonetheless, his worldly expertise is legitimated by his insight into Hero's “true” nature. His engagement in battle against Don John's slander guarantees that his production of plot, which, like Don John's and Iago's, is the furtive production of desire through the creation of a lack, shall nonetheless function as a revelation. Given this closure, his manipulative seduction affords gratification to the audience, but not without inviting a certain critical awareness of its own procedure. As in the case of the plots mounted by Prospero in The Tempest, and the Duke in Measure for Measure, the revelation of the artifice places the closure in abeyance.

Notes

1. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 81.

2. Northrop Frye, A Natural Perspective, 79.

3. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 19.

4. Terry Eagleton, William Shakespeare, 20-21.

5. Baldassar Castiglione, Il Libro del Cortegiano [1528]. This work had immense influence all over Europe, and was translated into English as The Book of the Courtier [1561] by Sir Thomas Hoby (London: Dent, 1944).

6. See Peter L. Rudnytsky, “The Purloined Handkerchief in Othello,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Literature, ed. Joseph Reppen and Maurice Charney (Hillsdale, New Jersey: The Analytic Press, 1985), 169-190. André Green, in The Tragic Effect (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 125-127, writes of the “dual origin of the handkerchief,” since Othello talks of it as a gift from his father to his mother. Thus Desdemona is the site of the feared lack, deriving from the castration complex, and the handkerchief functions as a Lacanian “veil” over a lack of the penis, provoking a desire to see. I am more concerned with the provocation to see than with arriving always at the same missing object.

7. Stephen Greenblatt, “Improvization and Power,” in Literature and Society, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed. Edward Said (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press), 80-81.

8. For an alternative, more rationalistic reading of the romance connection between Othello and Much Ado About Nothing, see John Traugott, “Creating a Rational Rinaldo: a Study in the Mixture of the Genres of Comedy and Romance in Much Ado,” The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance edited by Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Oklahoma: Pilgrim Books, 1982) 157-81. There is much to agree with here. However, Traugott is mainly concerned with questions of genre and parodic defamiliarization, explicitly arguing that Beatrice is in control of everything, leader of “the game-playing rationalists” who drive away the violence of romance through wit. There is no interest in the duplicity of wit itself or with its relationship to the anxious politics of regressive desire, which are central to my argument.